Re: Math, another auxlang, hadwan numbers & stress, and regional English

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, Muke Tever wrote:

> > From:    Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>
> > Subject: Re: Verb order in Montreiano
> >
> > (Conlangs as educational impetus toward learning real-life langs so you
> > can understand where the conlangs are coming from!  Too bad I'm not going
> > into foreign-language education or I could use conlang stuff.  I'm at a
> > loss as to how one to incorporate conlangs into math classes.)
>
> This reminds me of something I read in a book on an auxlang (Ehmayghee chah,
> I believe it is) I got from yon library.  (This appears on the back cover.
> The whole setup looks like something out of the fifties, but it's dated
> 1992...)
[snip]
> Now, doesn't that make you just want to run out and do your own conlang's
> math system better?  He says elsewhere that the number system is so great,
> that especially people who work with "foreign telephone operators" would
> find it very useful; this leads me to believe he is from another planet,
> where they have magic lossless phones.  (Three times at least every day I
> have to deal with people calling the lab and asking for '*garble*cia?' or
> somesuch...)
ROTFL!  Yeah, there would be that slight problem....

> > But seeing this made me want to ask: In what order do people like to
> > settle on grammatical features (whether or not said features are later
> > revised)?  I confess I've gone roughly from _Describing Morphosyntax_ and
> > Rosenfeld's Language Construction Kit: deciding on
> > agglutinating/isolating/whatever, basic word order, deciding whether
> > adjectives are verblike or nounlike or both or neither, etc.  (Which is
> > why I double-took when I saw your message, because word order is
> > something I decide on really early.)  But my eyes have been opened to the
> > possibility of other ways of doing things.  :-)  Enlighten me?
>
> I personally generally discover these things as I need them.  That is, I
> don't set out to fix all the little points of grammar (as I do, and probably
> shouldn't, with vocabulary, say) but rather I discover rules as the
> language's tendencies dictate.  Er, yeah.
I didn't expect to get a list or anything so definite.  :-)  Even with
the "guides" I cited, I go around doing things in a haphazard, "I feel
like working on X today" fashion.

OC, this was when I last had time to work on conlanging, period.  <sigh>

[snip]
> This is one reason why English people speaking Spanish words can sound funny
> even if they have all the actual phonemes right.  Or vice versa.  One of our
> teachers (from Mexico, I think) was talking about a ['dO.n@t], and had
> trouble getting understood until someone picked it up ('donut')... and he's
> like "that's what I said, you want I should say ['dO::::w.n@t]?"
<laugh>  Yeah--Americans speaking Korean sound funny sometimes because
they're stress-accenting what should be pitch-accented.  Not that stress
doesn't vary in Korean, but it strikes me as more on an emotional vector
(Koreans can yell a lot!).

> > How have other people handled stress/accent?
> With great evil.  >:)  Nah, stress in Hadwan is predictable for the most
> part.  I don't know quite _how_ to vocalize the rules for it yet, but
> they're there and they're pretty regular.
<choke/g>

> ER, okay, well, the 'generic' stress on a word is placed on the last
> syllable of the root, or on the first suffix.  However, most suffixes cause
> the stress to fall towards them *anyway*, and in some words the stress is
> 'fixed', which basically means the stress fell and doesn't have an
> opportunity in its whole declension to go back.
Interesting.  :-)

> Foreign stress rules always confuse me, though.  I'm used to assigning
> Latinate stress to unfamiliar words, which gets you basically nowhere
> reading, oh, Greek or Russian or pretty much anything that isn't Romance
> itself.    I had a question, and I forgot it.
<wry g>  I have this bad feeling that I'm going to end up unconsciously
pitch-accenting any language like Latin that has phonemic vowel length
distinctions, because I "hear" the longer vowels as being stressed, and
so I raise the pitch of the stressed syllable (whether or not it's long
itself) so I have *something* to work with.

YHL